Bracket Madness!

It’s almost March, and for college basketball fans that means filling in brackets for March Madness. Unfortunately, filling in the perfect bracket is almost literally impossible.

If you have no basketball knowledge whatsoever, your chances of crafting the perfect bracket is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. If you have a lot of knowledge in college basketball and know the teams inside and out, then your chances of crafting the perfect bracket is 1 in 128 million. The odds of being that one person is so low that billionaire Warren Buffett is offering one billion dollars to the very, very lucky person who predicts the fate of each of the 68 teams that are competing in the tournament.

Here are three pointers that will help you score an awesome bracket:

1. Make a ton of brackets, both silly and serious. Not all of your brackets have to require a lot of research, you can make brackets based off of silly things like what teams have the coolest uniforms, which team has the best mascot, which school names you like better and so much more! Serious brackets are a little bit harder to make than silly brackets because all of all the upsets. A first place team might play a bad game and be eliminated, so don’t just let standings dictate picks on your bracket.

2. Analyze the teams. This pointer takes a little bit more work, but it is definitely worth it in the end. First, look at past winners from March Madness and make a chart with how many times each team has made it to a Final Four, and has won overall. If you notice that a team hasn’t made it to the Final Four in a substantial amount of years, then you probably won’t have them advance far in your bracket. But if you notice that a team has made Final Four a lot of times in recent years, then you probably want them to advance far. You shouldn’t just base your bracket off of past tournaments, but regular season games as well. Look at how many away games the team has won. Make sure that the team has a high percentage of away game wins because the tournament will be played outside of their home court.

3. Change your bracket if you need to. Most brackets will let you change projections until right before tip-off of the first game. If the star player of a team that you thought would win gets injured, change your bracket! Yes, the team could still win, but their chances are less likely. If you have a strong feeling that a team won’t win, go with your gut and change your bracket last minute. Also, if you made multiple brackets, you don’t have to change all of them if you don’t want to!

If you follow these three pointers then your bracket could possibly be the 1 in 9.2 quintillion bracket! But most importantly, have fun and “may the odds be ever in your favor.”